Individualism is a core belief at the foundation of the great American experiment. In fact, it is a foundational concept animating the rule of law itself, thus contributing significantly to defining the boundaries between barbarism and civilization, as least as we currently understand ourselves. A focus on the individual helped to break the power of the church and establish the dominance of a secular public sphere where women and minorities, the poor and the disabled, have been somewhat better able to find a place.
We believe in individual rights to speech and property,
association, belief, and privacy. While
individual rights are frequently in tension with individual self-sufficiency
and the scope of our collective capacity to constrain each other (government
regulation and punishment of deviance), these conflicts then become center
stage for our political spectacle, more deeply reinforcing the importance of
the individual as the unit of analysis when we think of ourselves and our
communities today.
A 2003 article by Mark Earls, analyzing the impact of this
way of thinking on advertising, suggests that our focus on the individual is
wrong. He argues that “the most
important characteristic” of you and I is that we are “a herd animal”
(311). He starts with a story about a
crowd at a sporting event.
“Crowds are always unpredictable and mercurial. They can generate enormous feelings of
well-being and shared identity; equally, they can be enormously destructive and
irrational. Crowds are ‘contested,’ and
to those interested in maintaining order, dangerous and scary” (313).
Certainly this is consistent with research on the paradoxical
nature of community: the ways that we negotiate the meaning of law and
community to include some and exclude others as an inescapable characteristic
of community or tribe or herd. Community
suggests images of solidarity and lemonade stands as well as brownshirts,
gossips, and Pleasantville. Our
attraction to a focus on the individual was, in part, to break free of these
constraints to construct our own lives, as we choose. In the social sciences and the law, this has
meant a focus on the individual rational actor, despite the fact that
individuals rarely act rationally, unless we define the model such that any
action is rational because it was taken by an individual.
According to Earls, marketing decisions are still dominated
by this wrong-headed focus on individual rational action. Then, he surveys new research in a variety of
areas to support the plausibility of his claim that this is wrong-headed and we
ought to try to understand behavior in herds.
“The individual has been shown to be variously unreliable,
unaware of his or her behavior or motivations, easily influenced by others, capable
of significant self-deception, and so on” (316).
Then he uses the illustration of a horse trainer, who is
successful not because he connects with an individual horse, but because he
understands the “herd-nature of all horses: if a wild horse is excluded from
the herd it becomes (and feels) vulnerable; to be static is also to be
vulnerable…. So, he uses movement and herder-leader body language to encourage
the horse to ‘want to be with you,’ and want to do what you want, no matter how
unnatural it feels…” (316). Apparently
this same horse trainer has applied this approach to juvenile delinquents.
A short review of the ways we are influenced by others
begins to build a framework for thinking about ourselves as herd animals. Our own emotional state can be influenced by
the emotional state of others, cognition itself “is as much a social as it is
individual activity,” and “the ability to interpret others’ behaviour also
seems essential to our ability to learn without
experience... [and] that we learn at least as much from others as from our own
experience” (318-9, italics in original).
One the one hand this is disruptive, but it is also not so
unusual to think of ourselves as social animals and social learners. For advertisers, this change suggests that “the
consuming individual is a member of a tribe, where the product symbolism creates
a universe for the tribe” (322). One way
of thinking about the distinction here is that individuals are the “ingredients”
but it is the “interaction” of these ingredients that matters most. Just like the Zen koan about the disassembled
chariot. The noble asked, ‘where is the
chariot?’ All the parts are still right
there…but the chariot is not the parts, it is the relationship between the
parts.
What insights are gained from this change of perspective,
this reframing of how we think about ourselves?
First, network analysis suggests that “it is not the [few] strong links
that bind a network together but the [more numerous] weak links” (324). Second, habitual (rather than rational)
individual decisions may reflect a herd’s choice, which makes findings about
the relationship between these decisions and identity more robust than when
identify is merely an individual phenomena.
Third, when we disrupt rules or processes or expectations it is possible
that we are “acting on the herd’s shared assumptions” (326). Fourth, as we have all known for years, this
perspective highlights why word-of-mouth is the most powerful advertising tool,
accounting for “more than 80% of the influence on an individual’s actual
purchasing behaviour, with only 10% due to the direct impact of marketing
activity on the individual” (327). Word-of-mouth
is a voice already in the herd and their mobilization indicates that the
message has entered a new culture and is being talked about…drawing the
attention of the herd.
The audience, not the individual, is key. The herd and the “herd-ability” of a message
is more important that the traditional focus on persuasiveness (329). The individual ‘rational actor’ is actually
ignorant (330) of the source in the herd of their beliefs, convictions,
passions, and preferences and the information they provide is unreliable. Each individual is ignorant about most
things, relying on the expertise of others in the herd to purchase
prescriptions or repair a car, have a baby or transfer funds to the Cayman
Islands.
“We all know how difficult it is to predict the future but,
because we are more valued by our clients and colleagues if we swallow our
concerns and let them use our market research conclusions as if they were
predictive, we all do it. In private, we researchers are often prepared to
admit to this, but we find it terribly difficult to admit it in front of others”
(333).
“Advertising to the Herd: How Understanding Our True Nature
Challenges the Ways We Think about Advertising and Market Research,” Mark Earls. International
Journal of Market Research, v45n3, 2003.
